Requiem

Chapter One

I don’t know what about Lindale Creek had made me feel like I was safe in the seventeen years of my life I called it home. How could I have lived there, when now the mere thought of going back makes me squirm.

No. It’s not that feeling you get when you seem out of place or different from the rest of the kids. No. This was different. Lindale Creek didn’t make me feel lonely or like the odd weird kid... It scared the hell out of me. It’s simple as that.

It was not a rough neighbourhood. It actually seemed the opposite. It was that place where people who were tired of their exhausting city lives would come and start their families in their new modern-Victorian styled house, with their kids running around on the property grounds littered with dried leaves falling from the giant oak tree outside, while they sat and watched from the front porch swing. From the face of it all it was calm and quiet place. Sometimes all too quiet if you ask me. That’s the thing about Lindale Creek. Its silence and pretty postcard worthy picture hides all it’s secrets.

How could I have lived there for so long in my happy bubble that was impervious to all the ghastly things that were happening?

Perhaps I should ask when it started feeling unsafe to me.  Was it when the towns hall caught fire for the second time in that month? When neighbours wouldn't look at each other in the eye? Or when there were those countless burglaries happening around?  Maybe it all started much before, when that girl disappeared.
That possibly burst my bubble and made me run the first chance I got. That chance being the scholarship from Dewborne College. After that I never looked back, not until today.

I sat squirming in my seat in a smelly old tin tank like bus that was heading to its last stop, Lindale Creek.

The claustrophobic me would say I’m lucky enough to snag a window seat in this sealed container. But then again, most of the seats in the bus were eerily empty. Not a sound of mindless chatter or laughter or even whispers. A chill ran up my spine as I imagined all the different ways I could be mugged in this bus and I reflexively turned around to once again look at my fellow companions for what I think was hundredth time I had nervously glanced around. There were specifically four people on the bus, aside from me. A young couple who were fast asleep and middle aged man traveling with his son. They seemed harmless, I guess. Unless the couple actually turned out to be Bonnie and Clyde 2.0 and the other two were a ringleader of a thieving organisation out with his teenage right-hand in search of their daily haul.

Not many people would say that they were this skittish on their way home. But also they wouldn’t describe their town as a twin of some macabre town in a black and white era of a Hitchcock movie complete with the black beady-eyed birds and houses with creepy candle-lit secret passages that always felt would lead to the town graveyard.

I turn back to face the window and focus on the raindrops that roll down the glass as the bus whooshes past the big oak trees, by the side of the narrow roadways, which swayed gloriously against a jet black background in the heavy rainstorm at seven in the evening.

Just a normal Lindale Creek night.